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Help Writing an Open Standards Policy?
Cornwallis writes "I'm trying to save money for a local government agency I work for by writing a policy statement to support the idea of adopting open data standards and/or Open Source software in order to contain IT expenses (by reducing licensing costs). I am thinking something along the lines of supporting open standards by not locking in to long term software contracts so that departments could be freed to adopt an alternative OS and/or desktop suite if this would work for the individual department. The idea is to unlock the stranglehold that proprietary software may have on the department IT budget. Have any of you written policy statements along these lines, and would you be willing to share? I'm not saying this would be for everybody, nor replace everything, just be an option to help my beleaguered agency in rough times."
You can use any of a number of already existing policies. For instance, the Open Standards Policy of Massachusetts is very nicely worded:
Commonwealth's Position
--
Interested in exploring a possible business idea with friends?
For some good ideas to start with, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument_adoption and then head over to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts links. You can glean a lot of the policy formulation ides from there. They built a requirement to use open document format (not necessarily open source). http://consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/ is another good resource to start with.
Seems like this would be a good community project? Have a GPL'd proposal set up for others to use and customize as needed?
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
...from the Department of Information Resources (SRRPUB09). A little-known document outside of OSS circles, unfortunately.
A) Having an open standards means more citizens can contact them. If a poor woman with 4 children can't communicate with a city bureau and has her water turned off(for example) it would be a PR nightmare for the elected officials.
B) 2 - Slower upgrade cycle for the computers. I can't think of anything a government office does that can't be done using office 97. Yet they keep buying new computers and new software. I am of course talking about general government business. Clearly the people doing crypto, and designing nuclear planets, etc would benefit from having a faster computer.
Most accountants, management, help desk not so much.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Assuming you can make the case for doing so -- and it looks as though you have plenty of help there -- it might be worth clarifying what an "open standard" means.
For something to be considered an open standard, it must meet the following criteria:
- A comprehensive formal specification. (This should be obvious.)
- At least one reference implementation for which source code is freely available. (It doesn't have to be freely re-usable, so long as it's there.) OR, many very different implementations which can communicate. (There probably isn't a reference HTML/CSS renderer, but there are enough implementations that one isn't needed.)
- No legal issues for either of the above points, or the use of the specification. (Obvious example: No patents allowed, unless they've been turned over to the public domain.)
It should also meet the following criteria:
- A well-written, accessible, comprehensive formal specification. Or, both a formal specification and easier-to-read documentation.
- Both an official open source reference implementation, and several competing implementations.
- Corporate backing -- especially a corporate stake in it. This implies that said corporation has had their lawyers verify that there are no legal issues.
- Simple, clean design, especially relative to other standards providing the same thing. For example, if the choice is between SOAP and XML-RPC, you probably want XML-RPC -- and you might prefer REST to either of those, especially if your data is not XML.
- Popularity. This really matters the least, so long as the others are met -- it's more important that I can hold the ideals of REST in my head, and implement it from scratch in a few lines of code, than that there are probably more SOAP and XML-RPC implementations. But it shouldn't be ignored -- it would be insane to try to replace HTML with something completely different, for instance. (Both HTML5 and XHTML are incremental improvements, and are sane. Trying to replace HTML with a YAML-based format would not be sane.)
I'm not suggesting that policy has to follow these to the letter, but that's what I personally consider an open standard, and especially, what I consider to be a good standard. In the past, when I've called Microsoft's "Open" XML various names -- "Neither open nor standard" comes to mind -- these are the guidelines I was using.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
You might also want to contact your local Linux/FOSS User's Group for some ideas. For example, our user group ( http://www.twuug.org/ ) contains people from all walks of life, including people who work for government agencies. You might get a lot of positive feedback and support. Consider it "networking", just not in the computer sense.
Don't be discouraged- there are, unfortunately, a lot of factors that will work against you or at least for the status-quo. But everyone can make a difference. Just do the best you can, keep an open mind, respect others' points of view, and learn from the experience. It can even be enjoyable along the way.
The whole point of a long term contract is that they 'lower' the price in exchange for a steady revenue stream.
It doesn't matter if you're contracting support from MS, IBM, Red Hat, or with Sun for OpenOffice.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
It's all about using the right tool for the job. Sometimes proprietary tools are either:
a) the only tool for the job
b) the best tool for the job
It can be helpful to lock yourself in a contract to secure better pricing and support on proprietary software.
We all know and love the benefits of Free Software, but be careful that you don't shoe-horn people into using specific free, open, yet inferior software. If the traffic signaling hardware can be managed by a superior windows application or a half-supported Linux port, it would be irresponsible to force the DOT to use the Linux version in the name of openness.
I think, what you really need, is to talk to a lawyer. You want to have the best of both worlds: The ability to use open and free software, and the ability to create and break contracts with proprietary software. So you probably want some sort of clause in your contracts that says:
"We're a big client. You want our business. We'll sign a 5 year contract if we have the ability to renegotiate (or even break) our contract every X months"
Problem solved.
> ...to support the idea of adopting open data standards and/or Open Source software in order to contain IT expenses (by reducing licensing costs).
I think it might get a better reception if you invert the argument: don't present adopting open source/standards as the target; present saving money as the target, and open source/standards as the method.
> ...supporting open standards by not locking in to long term software contracts [and] to unlock the stranglehold that proprietary software may have on the department IT budget.
Same here. Make the objective to unlock the stranglehold and free up dependencies...by using open source/standards.
In half a life in state-funded IT managment, I have found that most public-service IT managers and local government administrators are woefully undereducated in software selection, and either a) have never heard of FOSS, b) think it has something to do with downloading viruses from bulletin-boards, or c) simply aren't bothered one way or the other unless it saves money or makes life easier. A very, very small number are on kickbacks from suppliers, but you shouldn't work for them.
There are a gazillion other benefits, but try to present them as serendipitous by-products of using open source/standards, not as ends in themselves. The immediate end is saving money (or its equivalent).
However, before you do so, make sure you aren't making a noose for your own neck. Sometimes a department or agency which saves real money finds that this is treated as evidence that they don't need any more resources ever again. It's sometimes better to use the move to FOSS as a way to free up money to do things you said were impossible unless you got extra funding.
Good luck, and please let us know how you got on. Post the document if that is permitted.
What a co-incidence, the Canadian government is apparently asking very similar questions.
STFU about slashdot bias.
I'm extremely impressed that Bruce Perens responds with his phone number and an offer of advice, which I assume we all appreciate is based on a wealth of practical experience and success, and even more impressed that just a few posts later someone suggests that what you really need is a lawyer. What a strange world. Perhaps the anon coward who suggested a lawyer is, in fact, a lawyer?
If you ignore Bruce Perens and opt instead to call a lawyer you should get fired ;-)
btw I'm writing this from my nuclear planet. I made it last week. I have a very fast computer. The planet is OK but a bit hot (I didn't have time to put the air-con in yet).
So you want to encourage open-source adoption? OK, a laudable goal. The two things that you are going to have to deal with from an IT perspective are support and version control.
Who, exactly do departments deal with for support? Will the IT department be the front-line resource and then farm things out as needed? Or are individual departments going to be going it alone? More to the point, is the experience if departments such that they would prefer to "go it alone" today? If the departments are your customers and they have been treatd well, then the probably will expect the IT department to be providing first-line support for them - as well you should.
One big reason for providing first-line support is version control. While some open-source packages have well-defined versions (Ubuntu, for example), many others do not. There are patches here and there and different versions being distributed from different web sites. If you are assuming interoperability of software being used by different departments it is going to be up to someone to ensure that this is actually possible. Having departments select their own versions and installing them will not insure this at all. If it then falls upon you to sort this out at some later date, you are going to wish dearly that you had been proactive about it. Yes, this may mean being ratuer draconian about individual users downloading whatever they want, installing it and counting on IT to pick up the pieces.
I have seen this happen, even within a community of software developers.
There is a substantial manpower requirement for this, and it needs to be in IT, not in individual departments. You are proposing something that will save money, but some of that immediate savings in software licenses needs to be shifted over to an IT function for support and version control. Ignoring this is not a viable option because you will end up with everyone being unhappy and upper management putting an end to this "experiment". No matter how happy they were with the initial savings.
Sure, overall costs can be lower. But some of that apparent savings needs to be funneled back into keeping things sane and managed. Things like Office Update and Microsoft Office web sites for templates, add-ons and tools do this for Office users and it all just works. You will be replacing this with IT resources at a great savings but you can't ignore things like updates, version control and support issues.
Based on white papers I've written in the past, I'd suggest the following:
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The Government of Canada, has some position papers and related material on Open Source Software available from Treasury Board of Canada, here, also there the Getting Open Source Logic INto Government / aka GOSLING / OISILLON (Options Innovatrices et Synergiques pour l'Introduction du Logiciel Libre dans les Organisations Nationales) which advocates adoption within government.
A somewhat related project (web2.0) is the internal GCpedia (Government of Canada own internal wikipedia), here is the Wikipedia entry.
New York published a report studying issues surrounding electronic records.
It mostly centers around document formats, but an appendix in Part 2 recommends that the state integrate the evaluation of open source software into procurement policy. You might find it interesting.
You can find it here:
http://www.oft.state.ny.us/policy/esra/erecords-study.htm
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I'd really like to see a policy that not only consumes open source projects but at the same time makes sure that all development done for any government is committed as open source (because it belongs to the people that paid for it in the first place, the tax payer). This would in my opinion drastically reduce the cost for local governments because it would allow applications written for one city/state/country to be used and adopted by other entities too. After all, a budgeting software for one county could also be used in the next county... and maybe a state and then some state adds a function that does a sanity check on the budget and maybe we can get them balanced then...
Technology investments must be made based on total cost of ownership ...
Thus the advertising and planted article campaigns claiming lower total cost of ownership than Linux.
Open [...] specifications are often less costly to acquire, develop and maintain and do not result in vendor lock-in.
Thus the move to obtain standards-organization approval for a "standard" document format based on their word processor - which was unclear enough to make it impossible to write code to handle the format based solely on the standard and flexible enough to allow them to modify and sabotage the format if anybody got close.
Looks like the wording of that document drove their strategy for fighting the move to open source.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'd [...] like to see a policy that [also directs] development done for any government [to be released] as open source [...]. This would [...] drastically reduce the cost for local governments because it would allow applications written for one city/state/country to be used and adopted [and adapted, rather than rewritten from scratch] by other[s].
YES! Great idea.
Administrators of government departments which are strapped for cash like to spend what they do have on their people rather than vendors. This:
- gives them a financial incentive (which snowballs as more sites adopt it and more code is released),
- improves the survivability of the digital records,
- creates more opportunity for transparency in government operation, and
- can lead to painless improvements in standardization of processes and procedures among government departments (and thus increase the ability of workers leaving one government site to find work at another).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
See the writings of people like Matt Asay and others about upcoming lock-in strategies. http://asay.blogspot.com/2006/05/future-of-lock-in.html
MS is ready to yield on formats if they can lock up the data in other ways.
The key is freeing the data and keeping it free. Open formats and standards and software help, no question. But an equally important preventitive is to make certain you have iron clad contract language enabling you to move your data from that vendor's system to a competing system, at nominal hassle and cost, and, if the vendor really wants your business, at the vendor's expense if it turns out to be more than nominal.
Somone please mod me up, I know the subject I'm talking about through and through from painful experience but I have no means to self-mod and get this thought to the original poster. Thanks.
Are you doing this because you want to save the district money and ensure format freedom, or are you trying to push open source software? The two may in cases be the same, but think of your motive. If OSS comes first, you are doing wrong by the district.
Things to consider: Licensing costs are a trivial piece of the pie. Supporting the products is the big cost sink. And frankly, that's going to be relatively flat no matter what you pick. Retraining people to use new software is going to eat up a big chunk of whatever savings you're generating. Probably a couple of years. Budget it in, or someone will notice it and use it spike your project. Preempt them or lose. And the big one - loss of office automation. This is the real Microsoft Office lock in - they provide easy to use scripting tools, and people use them. In any office that's been around for a while, there's a bunch of little process improvements floating around. Switching your software base will cost you all of this work, and you'll take an immediate, noticable productivity hit. And there's no good way around it - you can either suffer for a couple of years until they grow back, or drop a lot of money on consultants to replace them.
A mistake any organization can make is throwing out options. License Fees for software are often the least of people budget worries. and sometimes you end up with a better value with a close source and closed spec application over its expected Life time.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
in my investigation, I've found that actually their is a shared interest between privileged suppliers and government agencies for using closed solutions - as the privileged supplier can sell overpriced solutions, while the decision makers at the agency get extra treats. this circle is most probably difficult to break.
...at the Universal Interoperability Council.
The Universally Accessible and Interoperable Specification is being developed as an alternative to existing definitions of an "open standard" primarily because existing definitions: [i] clash with international law governing government procurement and standards development such as the Agrement on Government Procurement and the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade; [ii] do not adequately address the quality of standards; and [iii] have almost uniformly been bent to accommodate existing standards.
The approach taken in the UAIS is to lay down a set of evaluative criteria that describe the ideal against which standards can be compared. Few existing standards will fully satisfy the criteria. Careful attention has been given both to governing international law and many years of hard lessons learned in the standards development trenches.
The UAIS is a work in progress, but is to a state where I believe it may usefully be employed by procuring entities. However, I caution that the portions dealing with accessibility still need major revision to bring them in line with the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which entered into force on May 3, 2008.
You may also find of some use The Interop Glossary available at the same web site. The Glossary is "an evolving vocabulary for the law of interoperability governing electronic data format and communication protocol technical specifications, standards, and technical regulations."
You will find links to many other definitions of an open standard at Wikipedia and a more comprehensive treatment of the subject at Cover Pages.
-- Paul E. ("Marbux") Merrell, J.D.
marbux pine at maple gmail.com
(subtract the trees)
This might be helpful, Becta's Technical Specification, Institutional Infrastructure.
http://industry.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?resID=14615
In particular, pages 38 and following specify what formats Office applications must be able to save their documents in. This is the real problem.
We have Sharepoint at my org, and a department needed to be able to edit 1(one) field in an excel worksheet to perform calculations on other fields and print the full results (using Excel on workstation without paying office licenses on many workstations). They called me for a solution and of course needed one in 3 days. These calcs (in the spreadsheet) had already been through a stringent review process and since we had Excel services for MOSS 2007, we thought all is well. Turns out, excel services leverages the browser to print and content was missing. Tried to use the free excel viewer after editing the one cell in Sharepoint but got "Excel not installed" and viewer alone would not allow editing of that one cell. These other departments did not want to pay for a license of Office. After all this and people asking me for a quick solution I suggested using......*drum roll* Open Office's Calc program, (which I tested and would fulfill the requirements (free, easy to use, would open from MOSS 2007 repository and print all content)) but was told I was insane. "We can't use that!".....Now I'm not anti-microsoft nor necessarily pro open source, but here was a situation that the requirements and cost and time requirements were SCREAMING for Calc and it was rejected. Even as I pushed for it...I was pressed for a better solution under the (don't want to pay more, nor want to write a custom web solution, nor want to undergo another approval process, nor have more than 3 days. and for some reason, Calc was unreasonable? Can anyone tell me or take a guess at why this solution was not the best or give a better solution given these constraints?
Tons of economic research on ((dis)advantages) of use of FLOSS and Open Standards in government has been conducted by UNU MERIT in their FLOSS: Policy Support programme.
Besides that, depending on your audience and/or the specific IT portfolio you're addressing, cost might not be a strong argument, and it's certainly not the only one. Perhaps you also need to identify more intrinsic benefits such as government transparancy and "digital durability".
Prepare a thundering speech addressing all your co-workers and stream it to their desks using Silverlight.
I am on the London Linux user group list and the top priority on their monthly email is always real ale and the best place to eat.
The day they get off they fat over fed bums and start promoting Linux London will freeze over... oh, hold on, did they just do something then?
The International Standards Organisation support it. Surely that's good enough for anyone!
The U.S. Department of Defense's "Open Systems Joint Task Force" has some material.
Defining "open standards" is critical. Vendors with an open mouth will say they have an open standard. I'd go look at digistan.org for a more useful definition and justification.
European Interoperability Framework for pan-European eGovernment Services might help, too.
For statistics on why use open source software, see: Why FLOSS? Look at the Numbers!
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
http://www.e-croatia.hr/sdu/en/Dokumenti/StrategijeIProgrami/categoryParagraph/04/document/Open_Source_Software_Policy.pdf
If you need any additional info - don't hesistate to contact me.
Vlatko Kosturjak - Kost